wasmtime vulnerable to miscompilation of `i8x16.select` with the same inputs on x86_64

Impact

Wasmtime’s code generation backend, Cranelift, has a bug on x86_64 platforms for the WebAssembly i8x16.select instruction which will produce the wrong results when the same operand is provided to the instruction and some of the selected indices are greater than 16. There is an off-by-one error in the calculation of the mask to the pshufb instruction which causes incorrect results to be returned if lanes are selected from the second vector.

The impact of this miscompilation is that the WebAssembly instruction can produce incorrect results for the i8x16.select instruction. This should have no effect on embedders and does not represent a sandbox escape, for example. Guest programs, however, may behave unexpectedly due to the incorrect result of this instruction. In extreme cases if a guest program is handling untrusted input then the guest program may deviate from its intended execution, for example calling an imported host function with different arguments than intended. This still does not impact embedders, however, because there is no form of privilege escalation with the guest.

At this time it’s expected that this codegen pattern doesn’t show up in the wild that often. LLVM-generated modules, for example, do not appear to conventionally or idiomatically generate code which would hit this bug. It is possible, however, to still write code which triggers this, so it’s recommended for embedders to analyze existing modules to see if any are affected.

Patches

This codegen bug has been fixed in Wasmtime 6.0.1, 5.0.1, and 4.0.1. Users are recommended to upgrade to these updated versions.

Workarounds

If upgrading is not an option for you at this time, you can avoid this miscompilation by disabling the Wasm simd proposal

config.wasm_simd(false);

Additionally the bug is only present on x86_64 hosts. Other platforms such as AArch64 and s390x are not affected.

References

• The WebAssembly simd proposal
• Mailing list announcement
• GitHub advisory
• Commit to fix this issue on Wasmtime’s main branch

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

• Reach out to us on the Bytecode Alliance Zulip chat
• Open an issue in the bytecodealliance/wasmtime repository